I keenly anticipated my first visit to the Mystery House. Eventually, Winchester became the muse for my book on the history of the American gun industry and culture.Ī postcard showing the Winchester Mystery House circa 1900-05Ĭourtesy Flickr/ San Jose Public Library California Room When I heard her ghost story from a friend in graduate school, I was enthralled. Haunted by conscience over her gun blood fortune and seeking either protection or absolution, Winchester lived in almost complete solitude, in a mansion designed to be haunted. A relative said many decades later Winchester fell “under the thrall” of a medium, who told her that she would be haunted by the ghosts of Winchester rifle victims unless she built, non-stop-perhaps at ghosts’ direction, for their pleasure, or perhaps as a way to elude them. A spiritualist in the mid-1800s, when plenty of sane Americans believed they could communicate with the dead, Wincehster became terrified that her misfortunes, especially the death of her husband and one-month old daughter, were cosmic retribution from all the spirits killed by Winchester rifles. The answer: Her building is a ghost story of the American gun. In 1911, the San Jose Mercury News called Winchester’s colossus a “great question mark in a sea of apricot and olive orchards.” Over a century later, the San Francisco Chronicle was still baffled: “the Mansion is an ornately complex answer to a very simple question: Why?”

She had apparently forgotten about it and built over it. It had two chairs, an early 1900s speaker that fit into an old phonograph, and a door latched by a 1910 lock. Winchester hastily sketched designs on napkins or brown paper for carpenters to build additions, towers, cupolas or rooms that made no sense and had no purpose, sometimes only to be plastered over the next day. She built her house with shifts of 16 carpenters who were paid three times the going rate and worked 24 hours a day, every day, from 1886 until Sarah’s death in 1922.Īn American Penelope, working in wood rather than yarn, Winchester wove and unwove eternally. After she moved from New Haven, Connecticut, to San Jose, Winchester dedicated a large part of her fortune to ceaseless, enigmatic building. Her father-in-law Oliver Winchester, manufacturer of the famous repeater rifle, died in 1880, and her husband, Will, also in the family gun business, died a year later.

Winchester had inherited a vast fortune off of guns. In this provocative and deeply-researched work of narrative history, Haag fundamentally revises the history of arms in America, and in so doing explodes the clichés that have created and sustained our lethal gun culture. The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture

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